Stuff

Opinium’s weekly poll for the Observer has topline figures of REMAIN 44%(nc), LEAVE 44%(+2), so split right down the middle. The fieldwork was conducted between Tuesday and Friday, but the majority was before the murder of Jo Cox. Full tabs are here.

This isn’t Opinium’s final poll of the campaign – they’ve got one more to come on Wednesday. Still to come tonight there is also a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times. There’s also a ComRes online poll for the Indy and Sunday People, but it doesn’t include EU voting intention (it’s online, and ComRes only do EU voting intention on their phone polls).

UPDATE: There is also new Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday. In this case the fieldwork was conducted on Friday and Saturday, so took place wholly after the death of Jo Cox. Topline figures, with changes since Survation’s midweek poll, are REMAIN 45%(+3), LEAVE 42%(-3) – so Remain are back in the lead after dropping behind in the week. Interesting, but it is as yet only one poll…

UPDATE2: There is a new YouGov poll (one of two tonight) for ITV. Topline figures are REMAIN 42%(+3), LEAVE 44%(-2). Like Survation the poll shows a swing back towards Remain, but unlike Survation this poll was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday, wholly before the attack on Jo Cox, suggesting that there may have been a swing back towards Remain anyway. There is a second YouGov poll out later tonight for the Sunday Times, with fieldwork conducted on Thursday and Friday…

I have to say, this referendum will also highlight how Labour have less than zero chance at the next election. The status quo and safety vote is big, nobody is going to vote in a socialist pm and shadow Chancellor. That’s not partisan, it’s looking at history and using common sense.

It does rather look like a decent boost for remain, and I think it’s quite likely that there is some linkage to the Jo Cox murder. Apart from disrupting the campaign, which would always disadvantage whoever has the momentum, the clear sense of unease at the perceived linkages between the attack and elements of the campaign can’t be ignored.

There may also be an element of swingback, supported by the timing of some of the poll moves, so the position is by no means certain. If there has been a Jo Cox effect, the questions will be whether this ebbs away before polling day, which is quite possible, or whether the underlying momentum has changed.

The closest real-world example we have to the EU referendum poll is the Greek EU bailout referendum polling, on whether to accept the EU bailout terms.

Polling predicted a small lead to reject the terms, but in the end the margin of victory against the EU terms was a whopping 20%.

I simply don’t buy the idea of ‘swingback’ in a referendum where, for a huge number of voters who remember life before the Maastricht Treaty, Leave is a return to the status quo and there is almost no sentimentality toward the EU whatsoever.

What happened to Jo Cox was deeply shocking. It will be with many of us next Thursday. I suspect it will play a major part in the outcome of this Referendum.
I hope it leads to more civilised debate going forward.

Entire generations have come of age since Maastricht, and more since joining the EEC. Let’s not pretend we’re only rolling back to 1992 in terms of our economic relationships with Europe, it’s back to 1970 and beyond. That’s outside of the adult life of most voters I would think. Many of us grew up with the EU. Pretending that the situation 40 years ago is the status quo is a nonsense.

I do wonder if any of the protagonists in the campaigns have seriously considered the future, post referendum what ever the outcome.

I do believe that the vote leave group could have seriously enhanced their chances if they were able to give some concrete answers, after all it’s in the interests of Remain to say everything is unknown & uncertain.

Well in the Sindy there was a 5% swing back to NO in the last 24 hours, and assuming that gets repeated in this ref, Leave needed to be 6-7 points ahead to scrape a win. Two points isn’t enough, so unless there is some exceptional campaigning in the next few days, it looks like Leave has lost.

There is a reason the markets cheered when they heard Jo Cox had died:

What happens after the referendum depends on whether Juncker and co think a remain win is carte blanche to do whatever they like and unleash all the stuff they’ve been holding back.

If they do, some angry voters will demand another referendum and as UKIP are the only ones will deliver this, a break to UKIP in the Leaver heartlands (eastern and northern England) is on the cards. I think it will affect Lab more than Cons, as Tory voters tend to vote with their pockets rather than their emotions. So UKIP govt in 2020? The only way to head that off is the Conservatives getting another genuine deal from the EU – but I doubt the europeans will want to give them one. What a mess this all is.

We are now in the final week of the referendum campaign and the swing back towards the status quo appears to be in full force. We have published two polls this morning, one conducted for ITV’s Good Morning Britain between Wednesday and Thursday, and one conducted for the Sunday Times on Thursday and Friday. After the clear leads for Leave that polls were showing a week ago, both of our polls published today show the race coming back to neck-and-neck again: a two point Leave lead in the Good Morning Britain poll, a one point Remain lead in the Sunday Times poll.

[1] Who put the time of when he wrote it on, rather than when he expected it to be published.

Check Britain Elects twitter feed for all three polls this evening. All showing swing back, two showing remain slightly ahead. Interestingly this wont give the Remain side the Market Crash headlines I was expecting on Monday and financial meltdown which in itself would have helped Remain. But if that’s cos they are doing OK they’d probably prefer to be doing OK than need another £100bn to be wiped off the SE to be OK.

Great reporting as usual. It seems that the Brexit camp peaked a bit too early in any case, and the break towards Brexit can now be replaced with a break towards Bremain.
The pound certainly jump when Asian markets open late on Sunday.

Candy
“What happens after the referendum depends on whether Juncker and co think a remain win is carte blanche to do whatever they like and unleash all the stuff they’ve been holding back.
If they do, some angry voters will demand another referendum and as UKIP are the only ones will deliver this, a break to UKIP in the Leaver heartlands (eastern and northern England) is on the cards. I think it will affect Lab more than Cons,….”

Very interesting. I read somewhere (here?) that Juncker was poised to intervene before the day if it looks as though Leave might win, because he doesn’t want to go down as the President who let UK leave without saying anything. If he does of course, it will only help Leave. It’s true that UKIP came second in many seats in the East and North and other places, but in most cases they were a distant second to Labour. They may well get a boost from the scenario you describe but it would be truly remarkable to mean more than a few seats under our system.

1. Polling noise the movements are in the MOE
2. Knee jerk reaction that’ll wear off in time for the vote or genuine swing back.
3. How much the disruption in the campaign will reduce the timeline and hence the effectiveness of the final days of project fear.
4. If the polls are even correct they weren’t for GE or Scottish election

“What happens after the referendum depends on whether Juncker and co think a remain win is carte blanche to do whatever they like and unleash all the stuff they’ve been holding back.”

One of the features of the campaign period has been the delaying of anything emanating from Brussels that could cause a problem for UK voters. We know the new defence and foreign policy document is being held back, with some speculation that an EU army is being proposed, but today we learn that a group tasked with identifying alternative finance sources for the EU budget cancelled their June meeting.

According to the DT website (bias alert) the task group is looking at the potential for activating a so far unused legal power the Commission has to levy environmental taxes, that could levy taxes on petrol or electricity. Presumably this would replace direct contributions.

I’m trying to check whether these tax raising powers are real, and I presume that the member states could veto the EU budget, even if they couldn’t stop the taxes being imposed (so net contributions wouldn’t alter) but even so, the fact that direct taxation for the EU is being considered is likely to be deeply unpopular.

I suspect there is going to be an element of getting on with the business once the referendum is dealt with, and if so, then life may well become extraordinarily difficult for Cameron.

“Utterly disgraceful” is a bit excessive to describe that tweet. Rather insensitive I would have said..

However if there is a Jo Cox effect (and that is not clear since some of today’s apparent swingback happened before her murder), I am not sure it would necessarily be a sympathy vote. As I posted before, many people who read about her will think she would have been a much more likeable and credible person to front the Remain campaign that David Cameron. So perhaps they will listen to her views posthumously.

Since the truth about the political views of the man who has been charged is now plain for all to see, I think some people may also feel they need to redress the balance after a person has been denied the democratic right to vote in such a cruel way. And that may go further than one vote.

“The underlying figures suggest the movement may be more to do with people worrying about the economic impact of leaving the European Union. In the Sunday Times poll 33% of people said they thought that they would be personally worse off if Britain left the EU, up from 23% a fortnight ago and easily the highest we have recorded on this question.

The pattern of public opinion on the EU referendum is looking very similar to the Scottish referendum in 2014. Back then there was a long period of little movement when most ordinary voters were paying little attention, this was followed by a period of movement in favour of Yes, as people were excited by the prospect of change, followed by a sharp correction back to the status quo as, in the final days, people worried about the risks associated with it.”

I will be genuinely disappointed if remain win, as I feel that a vote for remain is putting the idea of togetherness (noble as it is with many virtues), above genuine democracy, which I still think is a huge long term problem. I think wider taxation, and more federal powers are inevitable. I suspect any back lash to this would actually be greater in countries with more current entrenched problems than the UK, the Mediterranean countries, Greece etc.

“I will be genuinely disappointed if remain win, as I feel that a vote for remain is putting the idea of togetherness (noble as it is with many virtues), above genuine democracy, which I still think is a huge long term problem”

The kind of genuine democracy where a party with 36% of the votes has 52% of the seats and an unelected House of Lords? Hypocrisy of a megalomaniac order!

I think that the Jo Cox murder will often be cited as the black swan event that kept the UK in the EU.

It will, of course, be more complicated than that. It may be swing back. It may be don’t knows coming down for leave. It may that it brought out doubts that would have come to the fore anyway in the ballot box.

I think that the error in the inevitable attribution of Remain’s win to the murder is that it will look at a pro-Leave blip in the polls as its baseline figure. The real baseline will be general trend of the previous year or even years. It is those views you’d expect to reassert themselves when it comes to the reckoning.

I say all this as a Leave supporter. For me, Farage’s two great errors were (1) pushing for a referendum when the polls were against him, and (2) not recognising that this referendum was not about core vote, but about appealing to Eurosceptics who had never found him appealing.

But politics never stops. Unless something drastic happens, immigration is only going to grow as an issue. The crises in debt, balance of trade and housing are also only going to grow. The whole pack of cards is going to get thrown up in the air anyway.

Well, it is my view that the swing to Leave coincided with the start of the European football championship, and the sudden rash of St George flags everywhere. Do you agree that would also be a legitimacy factor?

I don’t think anyone has been winning on the arguments so far, although some often repeated lies and half-truths have had their effects. People in democracies vote for all sorts of reasons, and imagining they somehow come to the right decision after careful scrutiny of all the facts is a bit of a noble fallacy. When the result is announced (and right now I have no idea who will win) we will just have to put up with it…

Most of the polling underpinning today’s numbers was conducted before Jo Cox was assassinated. So it seems likely that other factors were already moving people’s responses. This seems to be Anthony’s view in the article linked in OldNat’s post above.

ROGER MEXICO
Given this poll of UKIP within 10 points of Labour.
You can understand the (completely unsubstantiated) speculation Farage sees a narrow loss as a chance to replace a Corbyn led Labour Party as the Opposition in 2020 and/or junior coalition party as per Lib Dems in 2010.
5 more points or 20% increase and similar dip for Labour must be out there viz Labour Leave voters.
Meanwhile 8 MPs and few councils apart, why do the LibDems not merge with The Greens ? 12% is better than 8%. They could
get nearer UKIP in race for third place party.
Or else just disband and join the big boys. The MPs have tasted power and office. Ditto councillors (often in coalitions). They would get bigger offices, get on TV News, etc. They are no longer the protest vote and where are the funds to fight on ?

Joseph
“For me, Farage’s two great errors were (1) pushing for a referendum when the polls were against him, and (2) not recognising that this referendum was not about core vote, but about appealing to Eurosceptics who had never found him appealing.”

Don’t forget the GO group, of which Farage was a part, wasn’t even the official Leave campaign, so I don’t think he can be blamed if Leave lose. The only thing he’s done that seems to have upset anyone apart from Geldof, was standing in front of a poster that to me was reminiscent of the famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster by Saatchi. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it myself.

Our system is better than that of the EU when they forced out elected premiers in Greece and Italy and replaced them with appointed ex-Goldman Sachs eurocrats. It”s amazing how people who claim to be in favour of democracy cheered that on.

@Andrew111

The movement towards leave came the day after the televised debates with Andrea Leadsom, Gisela Stuart and Boris on the leave side and Amber Rudd, Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Eagle on the Remain side.

In other words it was the result of sober argument. England didn’t start playing till after the polls started registering Leave wins.

There were surely huge differences between the Scottish referendum and the current referendum?

The longevity of the Union, the undignified way the leaders of the national parties offered at the last minute ‘the moon on stick’ as a bribe to stay, highly contentious need for a new currency on leaving, oil dependency, potential for Scotland to lose its membership of the EU, nuclear weapons. I’m sure there are more.

Looking at the polling history for the Scottish referendum there were I think only ever 2 polls showing a Yes lead, the polling this time has been far more supportive of the change option.

Project fear was assumed to have worked although there was a fair bit of project carrot in the last days too.

I don’t think there has been an issue with Leave peaking too early. Their momentum has been stalled by the shocking death of a genuinely decent Remain campaigner.With Monday seeing a recall in Westminster and more coverage of Jo Cox it will only leave two days for the campaign to gain full coverage. Plus we have Euro 2016 reaching the group stage climax.

@ Candy. Agreed. Labour have a serious disconnect in their heartlands and face a major backlash from their supporters deserting to UKIP if we stay in the EU.
Referendums are causing Labour huge problems both north and south of the border and it is very difficult to see how they can play this
Labour need Andy Burnham as leader. He will appeal to a far wider audience than Jeremy Corbyn whose sullen approach is not working.

Well I’m still campaigning, and so are a lot of other people. It’s just a bit more low-key. I haven’t come across anyone who objected. Why would they?

@Mikey
“Labour need Andy Burnham as leader.”
Hasn’t he just failed to be a candidate for Mayor of Manchester? If he’s not considered the best candidate to run Manchester, why would he be the best choice for Labour to run the country?